Karnataka state in southern India supports a globally significant—and the country’s largest—population of
the Asian elephant Elephas maximus. A reliable map of Asian elephant distribution and measures of spatial
variation in their abundance, both vital needs for conservation and management action, are unavailable
not only in Karnataka, but across its global range. Here, we use various data gathered between 2000 and
2015 to map the distribution of elephants in Karnataka at the scale of the smallest forest management
unit, the ‘beat’, while also presenting data on elephant dung density for a subset of ‘elephant beats.’
Elephants occurred in 972 out of 2855 forest beats of Karnataka. Sixty percent of these 972 beats—and
55% of the forest habitat—lay outside notified protected areas (PAs), and included lands designated for
agricultural production and human dwelling. While median elephant dung density inside protected areas
was nearly thrice as much as outside, elephants routinely occurred in or used habitats outside PAs where
human density, land fraction under cultivation, and the interface between human-dominated areas and
forests were greater. Based on our data, it is clear that India’s framework for elephant conservation—
which legally protects the species wherever it occurs, but protects only some of its habitats—while being
appropriate in furthering their conservation within PAs, seriously falters in situations where elephants
reside in and/or seasonally use areas outside PAs. Attempts to further elephant conservation in production and dwelling areas have extracted high costs in human, elephant, material and monetary terms in
Karnataka. In such settings, conservation planning exercises are necessary to determine where the needs
of elephants—or humans—must take priority over the other, and to achieve that in a manner that is based
not only on reliable scientific data but also on a process of public reasoning.

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